A whole tradition of French discourse on
paintings has its beginning in the Piles and continues in Diderot,
Baudelaire, and Barthes. It is more conversation, perhaps, than
attentive viewing. This is a very different form of sociability about
pictures than the lectures Winckelmann gave to travelers in Rome. Art
history as an institutionalized discipline owes more to Winckelmann
and has in general been suspicious of the French conversational
manner. (The same holds true of museum visitors, between whom there
seems to be a division on national grounds. While school-children in
the United States, like gallery-goers in Germany, are expected to sit
quietly on the floor, listen to a lecture and then learn to answer
questions put to them about paintings, school-children in
France-Beaubourg is where I witnessed this-are encouraged to start
talking among themselves.)

In American classrooms and textbooks, it
was once a commonplace to think of Wölfflin as the father of formal
analysis-that tracing of diagonals or triangles that teachers of
introductory and even advanced courses in the history of art once
claimed to find in paintings. And it was also common to think of
Wölfflin as an historian of style. As an historian of style, he was
once perceived to have been at fault because he simplified or skipped
over steps (where is mannerism on his account?) in the historical
sequence. When style and formal analysis are out of fashion,
Wölfflin is not much on people's mind. But it is salutary to
remember that we owe our lasting habit of double-slide projection to
Wölfflin-that is, the peculiar technique native to the art
historian which amounts to seeing and describing each work of art in
terms of its difference from another.

From a review of The Making of Rubens by
Joanna Woodall, Art History, v. 19:1 (1996) p.139

The Making of Rubens is, in some
respects, profoundly dependent upon the separate work of fellow art
historians. Alpers herself does not venture far into contemporary
sources or the dreaded archives to substantiate and develop her
brilliant hypothesis. And why should she, as her particular,
extraordinary skill lies in an intensely creative, critical response
to what might be called the discourse on Rubens, a literature ranging
from Roger de Piles to the Corpus Rubenianum?